Thursday, 4 July 2013

Pop singer Miley Cyrus performs "Party in the U.S.A.", wearing black
hotpants suit and a denim vest, atop a luggage cart, at the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon, as part of her 2009 Wonder
World Tour: photo by calm down love, 14 September 2009

The party in the USA
Goes on all night and dayNow summer's hereWith its cargo of bedlam

Diet Coke and Mentos. A Diet Coke and Mentos eruption (or Diet Coke and Mentos geyser) is a
reaction between carbonated beverage and Mentos candies that causes
the beverage to spray out of its container. The numerous small pores on the candy's surface catalyze the release
of carbon dioxide (CO2) gas from the soda, resulting in the rapid
expulsion of copious quantities of foam. Although any carbonated
beverage will produce a similar effect, the reaction was popularized
using Diet Coke for seemingly producing the best results: photo by Matthew Woitunski, 26 October 2012

Chemical euphoria indeed. I think you nailed it. This post reminds me of my childhood-we weren't allowed to drink Coke as kids and when we got it, we liked to play with it in this way . . . Drinking it seemed more problematic. We also didn't go to the fireworks. Living on a farm, my parents skipped the whole thing.

If only it were an option . . . The farms around here are all soon to be fracked.

In 2005 I suggested that we celebrate this day as Ted Berrigan Day. Events of the last 14 years indicate that The American Revolution is OVER. Ted departed our realm on this very date in 1983.

Ted Berrigan, "Anti-War Poem"

It’s New Year’s Eve, of 1968, & a timefor Resolution.

I don’t like Engelbert Humperdink.

I love the Incredible String Band.

The war goes on

& war is Shit.

I’ll sing you a December song.

It’s 5 below zero in Iowa City tonight.

This year I found a warm room That I could go to be alone in & never have to fight.

I didn’t live in it.

I thought a lot about dying But I said Fuck it.

----------------------------------- And in today's New York Times: U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement - New York Times, 4 July 2013

" . . . Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, said whether it was a postal worker taking down information or a computer taking images, the program was still an invasion of privacy.

'Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,' he said. . . .

Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or in foreign intelligence cases."

Marooned in the steaming Lower East Side in the summer of 1967, Ted and I hung out a lot. (Perforce like they say -- most everybody who could make it out of the city to the various bucolic spongers' havens, did.)

That summer I was "digging the tribe scene", as Ted put it -- with of course no little amusement.

Everybody talks about Ted's grand sense of humour. Not much gets said about the edge there always was, in it.

I think it was on or near the Fourth of July that the Grateful Dead played a free concert in Tompkins Square Park, midway between our respective squalid homes -- Ted's on 2nd Street between C and D, mine on 14th near the corner of B (across from Stuyvesant Apts.).

The Daily News took our picture, believe it or not. Well, crowd shot. We happened to be in it, among the several freaks. A couple of years later I put that picture on the cover of a book.

This post is about the only thing worth celebrating on this sodden and soggy (around here, anyway) day of national pretending that we know what we’re doing.

In the fracked-up gas and oil fields of South Texas, in the Eagle Ford “play” as it’s called, itinerant petro-workers can rent, for an exorbitant fee, tiny metal sheds jammed together onto a piece of ground that’s been paved over and then fenced off. These are the new serfs who in a few years, when the Eagle Ford shale deposits are played out, will be “free” to move on to the next desperate carbon-mining operation in the Lower 48 (and getting lower all the time.)

I remember walking across St. Mark's one day, looking down, and Ted said to me "Harris, Look Up!"and I didand saw the gorgeous decorous facades on the tenements and the clouds and the great New York light changing the sky

You are still saying something like that

Look up!

Only lately it's more like

Look Out!

Looggoud! as we said in the Bronx

Watch it!

I can not even venture a guess as to what Ted might have thought or said about today's global tragicomedy

I get to hear this too often..Every person i ask "what do you do" and they reply all too excitedly "Party"..Almost everyone i come across..And there is not,not ever a variation of tone,the palpable casualness or the tendency to shy away from defining what it is actually ..."It's just party,you know..party"..Life i suppose is a party and i did not get invited..Because certainly everyone seems to be going to it..

Hello again, friends, good to be here with you again, in the dawn after Independence.

Day, I meant, of course...

"celebration meme" -- bingo!

The entire fun-packed post compacted, much like a planked and fractured aquifer, into two little almost-words.

(Planking, another cool meme.)

And indeed, after yet another long taxing emoticon-avoiding non-party night here in the cockpit of the dashboard, what is there left to fall back on (scream out for) but... the memes.

If fracking had a meme, like maybe one of those cute little happyface-punctuation-thingies, then maybe somebody could isolate it and begin work on extirpating the virus... even as, far above the lab bunkers in which the co-optable technicians listessly toiled, the research-suppressive lobbyist cheques floated in as if unseen to nestle beneath the airfoam legislator pillows, gentling the dreamlife of our bought er duly elected legislative representatives.

(Of course what would they ever dream about, apart, that is, from assisting obediently and patriotically in the "sharing" of our data, really?)

(Take a bow Senator Madame Chiang Di-Fi, like yeah!)

But -- like yeah! Party! Awesome meme there, dude!

There are certain words from which one instinctively recoils. To each her or his own lexical disgust. False etymologies and contemporary techno-sociological associations, each of itself bad enough do the trick with any word for yours truly, may combine to create a sort of fusion-on-the-brink-of fission-affect of consummate lexical mega-revulsion. Having heard it batted-about much as a mid-term-paper shuttlecock by university students for some years now, almost as though it actually meant something,"meme" qualifies in this category for me. It is as though "Awesome!" were being fitted out for a postgraduate degree. (Like yeah!) "A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects." (Malcolm Gladwell). Commentators who have likened the transmission of memes to the spread of contagions are obviously on to something.

That whole Miley video is one extended meme-stream (like yeah!) composed of a series of little meme-lets (the mega-size American flag from PATTON, the throwing-up-hands like yeah!, & c.).

But hey, what's not to like about a contagious information pattern that (like yeah!) replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior like yeah!, causing them to propagate the pattern.

I suspect Miley herself (like yeah!) is indeed not real, merely a membot.

"Membot: A person whose entire life has become subordinated to the propagation of a meme, robotically and at any opportunity. Due to internal competition, the most vocal and extreme membots tend to rise to top of their sociotypeUs hierarchy. A self-destructive membot is a memeoid."

Okay, like yeah! I think I get it...

It's possible your experience with the Miley song may be a recovered-meme-memory. Often this is associated with a more serious condition.

"Meme-allergy: A form of intolerance; a condition which causes a person to react in an unusually extreme manner when exposed to a specific semiotic stimulus, or `meme-allergen.' Exo-toxic meme-complexes typically confer dangerous meme-allergies on their hosts. Often, the actual meme-allergens need not be present, but merely perceived to be present, to trigger a reaction."

But it's never good to lump apples and oranges together while running for the exit like yeah! at the fireworks show (unless of course one is whipping up a delightful little holiday batch of appleorangesauce with shrapnel-laced blood pudding on the side like yeah!), so let's be clear on one point: even the most abject membot is at least better off than a memeoid, or memoid -- that is, a person "whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a [meme] that their own survival becomes inconsequential in their own minds."

For example, I've decided to plead advanced memoidism as defense against any charges "stemming from" the following "exhibition of content" (stop me before I link again like yeah!):

Often, of course, there are errors in the meme-replication pattern. These are attributed most commonly to memetic drift: accumulated mis-replications, or changes in the sequencing or rate of memetic mutation or evolution. With the possibility of this sort of error in mind (like yeah!), it's frequently advisable to inoculate oneself in advance before dipping a toe into the meme-pool. Perhaps the best protective strategy like yeah! is to turn your memes backwards, like Linda Blair's head in the Exorcist. Same principle, basically like yeah!